Starting All Over Again With the Avengers!!

So back in 1991, a friend of mine came over with his latest pack of Marvel Universe Series II trading cards.  At the time all I knew of comics was Spider-man (who I assumed was on a team with Iceman and Firestar) and the Hulk, because they both had had awesome cartoons that I had watched as a kid.  Well I quickly got sucked in to this madness and HAD to have my own.  So as I started to collect the trading cards, I noticed that the backs of the cards had all kinds of information on them!  First appearances, major storylines, crossovers, battle issues, and all kinds of stuff that I would never otherwise have known…and so it started…

I began by picking up 1^st appearances because I knew that these characters looked cool now but how much cooler would it be to see when they actually first showed up right!?  Well from there I also got into other big issues: epic battles, death issues, major change ups on a roster that sort of thing…  And then I got to the new comics and it all got a little dicey from there.  1^st appearances turned into recent appearances, major storylines turned into current crossovers (at the time it was Rise of the Midnight Sons and X-cutioner’s Song), and whatever “milestones” were happening (as luck would have it, the Mutant Milestone issues of X-men had just recently happened).  And so began my obsession with collecting comics, almost exclusively X-men, but I was also dragged into the entire Midnight Sons line and I wasn’t exactly kicking and screaming. 

Since then, as many of your will already know, my X-men collection has taken on a life of its own.  I have full sets of many (if not most) of the X-related series that Marvel has ever released.  I have limited editions, signed issue, comic cells, doubles and triples, and god knows what else X-related I can dig up in my piles if I really looked.  But then came a new problem…what do I do now?  Half the fun of collecting is getting all the issues, finding the good deals on the great issues, and the search in general, but I now have most of what I set out to collect with just the odd limited series or gap of issues to fill in.  The chase was done, for the most part.  The only thing stopping me now was money, I know where to get everything I want if I feel like it.  Enter: The Avengers.

I will be the first to admit that, as a die-hard X-men fan, I wrote off the Avengers YEARS ago.  Something about mutants being born with powers, and the struggles they endured really grabbed me in a way that old war heroes, billionaires in iron suits, and a crack shot marksmen simply didn’t.  So I stuck with my X-men and remained polite rivals with the OTHER TEAM.  Until Avengers: Disassembled, House of M, Civil War, Secret Invasion, and Siege happened!  I was actually on a break from collecting comics during much of this or I may have missed it to be honest.  I came back to collecting comics during the opening parts of Dark Reign (which didn’t affect X-men much so I didn’t collect it as I was coming back) and I realized that between House of M, Messiah Complex and everything else going, I had missed a lot so I set out to get everything I missed.  Thanks to the magical miracle of eBay I had great success!!  I managed to get the entire storyline for House of M (including Disassembled and all the HOM tie-ins) and Decimation (including spin-offs like Son of M/Silent War and Deadly Genesis/King Vulcan), Civil War, and Secret Invasion. 

                              

Now maybe it was the lack of X-men comics to buy, or maybe I just needed to read about them all in one big lump, but I was suddenly DRAWN to the Avengers comics.  Tony Stark’s alcoholism (which never really went away), Steve Rogers’ constantly struggling to uphold an ideal that many people feel is antiquated, or Carol Danvers’ inner turmoil as she struggles to be the best superhero she can be.  These were all real issues and problems that I had felt was missing from Avengers earlier years while the X-men were rife with strife and fighting the world and sometimes each other.  But here they are!!  So I never bothered to get on board with Dark Reign, but, thankfully, Marvel gave us all a very convenient jumping off point for new reader: The List.  You didn’t have to read Dark Reign to understand the general ideas of what was going on in The List and the status quo that it was trying to set up.  This lead right into my first major company crossover since Onslaught (I touched on Maximum Security but it didn’t really have the all-encompassing scope or the infinite tie-ins that most crossovers have), which was Siege.  Siege came and went, and thus began the new Heroic Age!  I instantly jumped on the 4 main Avengers books, and I was hooked! 

                                

Well from reading the beginning of this article, you can guess what happened next…  I instantly got right on eBay, hit the 50 cent bins, raided some old back issue racks, and whatever I could to start up my new Avengers collection!  So now I have a whole new arena of comics to fill up and feed my insatiable obsession, and unlike with my X-men collection, where I am down to needing the odd issue here and there, there’s huge selection of issues that I still don’t have yet!  Unlike Uncanny X-men, the number of Avengers issues I’m missing still numbers in the hundreds!  So in a way it’s like I’m starting all over again.  I remember getting my random back issues back 1991 and how exciting it was to get an issue here or there and then get the middle ones to have the whole story come together.  As of now, I have about 30 or so individual Avengers issues (and a major lack of money) not including anything after Onslaught with my oldest issue being #193.  I still have almost no idea what going on with these characters at this point, but it’s going to be so fun to fill in the blanks and see how they became the heroes that I buy every month now, whether they ended up Avengers (old or New), teachers (like in Academy), or secret operatives (shhhh no one knows about Secret Avengers).  Avengers Assemble!!!